What is it with antipodeans and post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasies on wheels? This latest from Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyen and Fran Walsh, the Lord Of The Rings writer/ producers, is Mad Max with conurbations. After a 60 Minute War, the world is made up of cities-on-wheels that go around preying on weaker towns-on-wheels. The film goes one better on the convention of casting Brits as the villain: here London is the bad guy, rampaging across the continental mainland, and St Paul's is the Death Star.

Taken from a quartet of novels by Philip Reeve, it's a ludicrous but appealing premise* which keeps your hopes up for about 20 minutes. London-on-wheels, with its bobbies and telephone boxes, looks like a live action version of Howl's Moving Castle directed by Terry Gilliam and there are a couple of good laughs: one about Minions and the line “We should never have gone into Europe.” After that though the film ditches its irreverent streak and reveals its origins in YA fiction. So, we get all the usual YA slop about noble orphans with destinies to fulfil. Alarmingly, even though it is over two hours it looks like it has been edited down from something much longer: characters appear and then disappear from the narrative which is rambling and incoherent.

*I like the way in the movies and YA fiction, nuclear apocalypse or societal collapse brings out a marvellous flourish of invention and off beat creativity in the survivors. It wasn't like that in Threads.